Category: people

The director in lockdown says he reads and watches everything: “WrestleMania. The Kardashians. I’m fascinated by it. So I don’t say read Tolstoy and nothing else. Read everything. See everything. The poet must not avert his eyes.” – The Guardian (UK)

Bemused locals were left to digest the fact that the pleasant newcomer to their island paradise, who had been helping out at the local animal shelter, was in fact a fugitive art dealer who stands accused of, among other things, selling millions of dollars worth of overlapping shares in valuable pieces of art, in one of the greatest art scams this century. – The Daily Beast

On stage, he enjoyed a dazzling early period and triumphant later years, most especially in Shakespeare and Pinter; but, if there was a prolonged period when Holm was absent from the theatre, it was because he suffered a temporarily paralysing form of stage fright. The theatre’s loss, however, was the cinema’s gain. He transferred the vocal precision, technical skill and impish mischief he had displayed on stage to the screen, enjoying a new, late-flowering career in scores of movies including, most notably, the Lord of the Rings cycle. – The Guardian

A precocious talent who began playing in Texas jazz clubs at age 12 and continued to perform for most of his life, he spent many years teaching theory and composition at UMass-Amherst and wrote more than 100 scores as well as 15 volumes of poetry and the influential textbook Jazz Theory and Improvisation. – The New York Times

“At the start of the second world war, Vera Lynn … was an up-and-coming dance band singer. By 1945” — thanks to her hits “We’ll Meet Again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” — “this working-class young woman had become a symbol of the British wartime spirit, with a status comparable to that of the patrician prime minister, Winston Churchill. After the war, her friend Harry Secombe liked to joke that ‘Churchill didn’t beat the Nazis. Vera sang them to death.'” – The Guardian

Banes was the first dance critic to write about the exciting new urban form known as break dancing. Her article “To the Beat Y’All: Breaking is Hard to Do,” in the Village Voice in April 1981, introduced break dancing to readers before there was even a name for hip-hop culture. Fascinated by what she saw, she returned to this genre again and again. – Wendy Perron

“For more than a half-century, Ms. Linklater taught vocal technique to A-list stars like Patrick Stewart, Donald Sutherland and Sigourney Weaver; to students at New York University, Emerson College and Columbia University; and to people far removed from the performing arts who simply wanted to be less timid vocally. … Two books she wrote … have become part of many actors’ kit bags: Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language (1976) and Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice: The Actor’s Guide to Talking the Text (1992).” – The New York Times

“The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. … [They] are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas. … The root of this problem is the society that we’ve created that contains this schism, and we don’t deal with it, because we’ve outsourced our accountability to the police.” – The New York Times Magazine

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. – The New Yorker

Navaretta was not an artist herself, nor a gallery owner, but she was a quiet force on the art scene in New York and beyond. In the early 1970s she was immersed in various efforts by women to secure a bigger voice in the art world, and in 1975, with Judy Seigel as founding editor, she began publishing Women Artists Newsletter, covering issues and events of interest to women in that world that often went unmentioned in mainstream publications. – The New York Times